I think I write to alleviate upset. I'm afraid I mean my own upset, though naturally I would like to claim a more philanthropic motive. In the end, of course, you do your readers a favour by confiding in them and making them privy to your distress, because it's always good to learn how bad things are for other people; but that's a beneficent side-effect. The need to shed is where it all starts, to pass the pain, to have someone else shoulder your burden - not for you, but with you.

Distress, pain, burden - none of these is quite the word for the pang which, for me, initiates a novel. Shame is probably the best I can do. Ashamed to find myself in tears, I have to dramatise the whys and wherefores of those tears; ashamed to find myself in an absurd or unworthy situation, I have to mine the laughter which, mentally or spiritually anyway, will get me out of it.

Though from an early age I liked to think of myself as a writer born, fancying that I came into the world with words in my mouth, with sentences already on their way to being formed, it took very specific events to make me want to accost those sentences and put them in some order.

The first I can remember was a street fight, two grown men squaring up to each other right outside my house. We lived in a poor but respectable area of Manchester, Cheetham Hill: cobbled streets, squeezed Victorian terraces, everyone pressed into the faces of everyone else. If there was a domestic row 10 houses away, we heard it. Births, marriages, infidelities, deaths, they came and went in front of our noses.

It is a fearful sight to any child: grown men - your father, your friends' fathers, your uncles - fighting as though they mean to kill. Or it should have been a fearful sight. All the other kids appeared to be loving it. They cheered, they laughed, they passed flippant asides to the adults gathered in the street, who also should have been sickened to their stomachs, but were not.

How old was I? Nine,10? Too young to have read any Thomas Hardy or DH Lawrence yet. But the confusion of emotions I felt - was there something wrong with me to have been so upset, was there something wrong with the rest of them not to have been? - urged itself upon me as a story. Not an essay, but a fiction. Only by making it all up again could I turn my mortification into a character, and allow him to speak and be spoken to. I started, but at nine or 10 there are too many other calls upon your attention for you to get round to finishing a novel.

The shame which did at last issue in a novel, my first, was of the more farcical sort. I was teaching English literature at a polytechnic in the Midlands. That, in my eyes, was already shame enough. We needn't go into why. People grown accustomed to feeling shame find it everywhere. But the crowning humiliation - felt by all of us in the department, the callous and the easily bruised alike - was the news that humanities, of which English literature was a humble branch, was to be moved from the body of the polytechnic proper and housed in the local football stadium. There are many indignities associated with teaching English literature in the modern world, but this was an indignity too far.

It is no exaggeration to say that this time I had no choice in the matter: only by hyperbolising it into fiction could I release the laughter lodged like an ulcer in my gut. The laughter of readers confirmed a sort of blessing on the mishap which had become my life: they laughed because they understood, and that meant that their lives were mishaps too. There were, though, some critics who found the plot a little fanciful. An English department being moved into a football stadium? Come off it.

Who's Sorry Now? grew from still another shame: the shame of being a man. Interestingly, no one finds that idea fanciful.